How to Count on One Hand

I find it useful sometimes to use the Indian Classical method of counting beats.  Touch your thumb to index finger for beat one, middle for two, ring for here and pinky for four.  If beat five is needed, open your hand.  Somehow, the tactile nature of touching fingers together is nice, and compared to the Western way of opening each finger, it seems easier you get used to it.

Three Views of a Mountain.

Photos from The State Library of Victoria

I love that he has the orchestra sing.  And the ensemble, Far Cry, sounds awesome.  Bravo, Kip Jones.  Kip, by the way, is a Minnesota violinist, who plays around the country with the acclaimed Ethel String Quartet.

My All-Time Favorite Books About Making Art

Photo by Adinda Navartierre.

What I Talk About When I Talk about Running by Haruki Murakami

A masterful writer whose novels are an absolute favorite of mine talks about his obsessive pursuit of running marathons and admits to learning almost everything he knows about writing from it.

The Chairs Are Where the People Go by Micha Glauberman with Shiela Heti

Neighborhood associations…the rules and subtle dynamics of charades…whether improvising is best experienced by improviser….the art of spam filtering...and other observations fill this art-themed conversation between Micha and artist Shiela Heti.

Encyclopedia of Everyday Life by Amy Krause Rosenthal

This book is genius in format and in content and reading it feels comforting-- a slice of life and a piece of art.

The Listening Book by W.A. Mathieu

Like a "paper uncle" this book might be a presence in your through the years, watching you grow bigger ears and and a heart more resonant to the ordinary sounds of everyday music. 

   Photo by Anna Hanks

Technique is the Weather

Image source: Arallyn

The word technique has dangerous implications, I think.  It sounds like an unchanging thing that you can sort of install somehow, like a piece of software.  While certain things in music making do become automatic over time, the reality is that technique is how you do things.  It varies to some degree every day, and it varies depending on the demands of the music that you play.

Is it possible that technique is less like a set of robot skills and more like the weather?  Here is a front coming in influenced by your recent playing, there is the another one representing new musical ideas.  Solar energy is your focus, wind energy is discipline, and the landscape is ergonomics...does technique describe the daily weather in your personal music land?  Does it describe a dynamic system like that?

I always joke to my students to "blame it on the weather" when they have a bad playing day, or bad practice week...now, perhaps they can blow those words back in my face.

Columbus Day Storm, Portland Oregan 1962 

How to Get Yourself to Do Something

 


Here is a topic that I have thought a lot about and to which I will probably return to in future posts.  It seems to me that getting yourself to do something-- anything-- on a regular basis has a lot to do with habits and patterns, big and small.  With music playing here are some things I've found to be helpful for me and for students.

-Find triggers that motivate you.  Listening to music whether familiar or new, gets me ramped up to play, and reminds me what it's about.  

-Remove barriers.  The simplest is leaving the instrument out of the case, so you can just pick it up and play, unplanned.  

-Make room in your life.  Everyone is busy.  We need to make space for something new, to take root and grow, so to speak.  

-Be patient with yourself.  It is a process to install a new habit and really make something part of your life over time.  

-Track what to do.  Whether you log the hours or the songs or the scales, this feedback is invaluable.  And, it actually can be kind of fun.  

-And, above all, remember to enjoy making music...in all its spectacular novelty, so to speak...

Images from The State Library of Victoria collection.

This is Your Mind on Improvisation

For a long time, I have been encouraging students to improvise.  In doing so, I find myself trying to describe how improvisation feels, and what kind of things need to happen in your mind.  It is an interesting pursuit.  Not everyone feels drawn to it either...but then it is something you have to learn to do.  To be off-the-cuff actually requires knowledge, experience, and preparation.  In any case, here are some of my main points about the process. 

You have to not think, while at the same time being awake and aware.  This requires not being self-conscious.  When you are engaged in this process, you ask your brain to concentrate fully and accept what is happening-- to work with what you've got.

It works best if you don't judge while creating.  It is near impossible to judge your own performance accurately while playing, anyway.  When you do start evaluating and or worrying how things might measure up, it is best to steer yourself back to the sound at hand.  

Thinking of what to play can be a challenge, especially for beginners, but since it is all about playing a note and then another, that's about all you can do.  As you play, further ideas will usually suggest themselves.  Anyway, some boredom balances out excitement, and repetition makes possible the element of surprise.  

By far, the best feeling is when your attention is totally wrapped up in the sounds and in the process.  There are many terms for this-- getting in the game, the flow, the zone.  As all these terms imply, this is a state that you must learn to evoke in yourself.  This takes time, and it isn't always possible to get your notes whizzing and your mind at ease in every improvising situation.  The important thing is that you act, going note by note, with intention and, I daresay, with passion.  

St. Paddy's Day

They say everyone is Irish on St. Paddy's day, and I can say I am more than a quarter Irish myself, maybe a third, mostly on my Mom's side.  The side whose name I have as a middle name-- the Gilligans-- came to America in my great grandparents' generation and I seem to remember that one of them stole the money for the boat fare, tricked his family after they traded in their harvest or their horse. In any case, we should all take note that in Ireland Paddy is a nickname for Patrick, Patty for Patricia, and the Shamrock is three-leafed for the trinity, and that we have therefore bastardized another holiday in our American way.  

Music history-wise, it is interesting to think about the way Irish music bled into American fiddle in a major way.  I like to imagine the evolution process of these things, how slowly an Irish lilt could become American drawl and swagger, adding syncopation, and something raw and angular, as it headed west.

Anger/Walsh/Gordy Highlights

I liked Joe Walsh's version of Mole in the Ground, a traditional song on which he has expanded.  As he joked last night, he didn't think it was sad enough before. I couldn't get it the song to embed in this post, but here is a link where you can play the song, or purchase a download.

Interestingly, my two highlights are vocals.  This other one by Karl Doty, came out of songwriting frustration he said.  How often is it true that we don't get something good until we break away from our notions of what we thought were going to write.

You will hear a rock-influenced solo by Darol (playing on octave violin) as well as Grant playing a bit out. (If you're not familiar, that playing out generally means using notes beyond the 8 normal ones in the key.)  They then start playing Bill Monroe's "Old Dangerfield," which I recently learned was named for a town in Texas.



Students: in the string band format, the instruments ring so sweetly together, the sound is generally high-end rich (though this is balanced by the use of octave fiddle) and this type of group, with or without banjo, tends to be a very distinctive sound.

Anger/Walsh/Gordy

I thought you might like to know that a fiddler who has been quite influential on me is coming to town.  Darol Anger played in the Turtle Island String Quartet (and before that David Grisman Quintet) before branching off into his own territory, which is generally somewhere "between the cracks" of art and folk music.  Darol has said that you can let people know what you feel through improvising, that you can remind them who they are and where they come from through folk music, that jazz and fiddle share a tendency toward lots of running notes, that you can recognize a fiddler by the way they end their bowstrokes, and that a huge part of learning your instrument is just about "logging hours."  Darol also helped develop the rhythmic chop technique, as well as teaching to the next generation at workshops, which is where I learned it.  Joining Darol is mandolin player Joe Walsh, who is originally from Duluth-- a nice guy who I also know a bit.  This music comes out of Bluegrass for sure, with ringing acoustic instruments and virtuosic speed, although I like the above track for its relative simplicity.

The show is next Friday, March 14 at the Cedar Cultural Center.

Show details and tickets

John Cage says...

John Cage said, among other things, that a composer music take responsibility for getting their work performed.  For a few more days, you can see Cage scores on display in the lobby of the MN Center for the Book Arts.  These scores are beautiful, and it is interesting to see what they look like.  I liked seeing Cage's handwritten direction in ink, and the scores seemed so visually pleasing in and of themselves.

Speaking of composers getting their work performed, I can tell you about playing Carleton Macy's quartet at Macalester this weekend, for his final "swan song" at the college, before retiring.  It was a challenging piece full interrelationships throughout the material.  In it is found quotes of both Rennaissance melody and "Someday My Prince Will Come."  The titles were from the Book of Lamentations, hence the title "Lamentations" and overall the mood was often anxious.  Perhaps I can see about getting permission to add a few audio clips to this post.  I wish Carleton well, as he moves back to "paradise" as he calls his hometown of Carmel, CA.